The burgeoning love affair between Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani, two of the coaches on the NBC show “The Voice,” has a lot of people talking. Both are creative, talented musicians, whose life histories, home lives, previous relationships, musical backgrounds, career directions, and forms of artistic expression are vastly different. He’s a country music star who, through the years, has taken a more conservative approach to recording, performing, and now “coaching,” by staying close to his country roots. Conversely, she is the trailblazing lead singer of a funky, edgy, progressive pop band who has pushed limits, broken down barriers, and shattered the glass ceiling for current and future female pop singers everywhere. For these reasons and many more, they are a surprisingly unlikely romantic pair.

So how did this unlikely duo end up falling in love so seemingly quickly, yet with such certainty that they both divorced their long-term partners? It’s as if the world outside their collective coaching experience on TV just melted away. Here’s the thing: While Blake and Gwen are unique, their situation is not. A heightened, shared experience can bring people together, against all odds.

On some level, being a coach on “The Voice” means being shut off, sequestered from the rest of the world while you are doing your job. A coach on this show works both separately and with the three other coaches, team members, backup performers and guest coaches. In this suspense-filled, often electric atmosphere, coaches perform together and get to experience firsthand each other’s command of their craft. They joke around and banter on and off camera. The collective goal of helping their “students” grow and evolve under their mentorship is a profoundly unifying, meaningful and rewarding experience. It’s a high in itself that evokes camaraderie and connection – which can also readily bring unlikely people together.

During the taping of any reality show, contestants and judges can be sequestered so that results and opinions don’t leak out to the general audience and spoil the outcome. On “The Voice,” the coaches are also judges and are solely responsible for decisions that readjust, reconfigure, and reshape their teams as team members are eliminated. Week after week, the four coaches on “The Voice,” are put in the position of having to send someone “home,” which is stressful and doesn’t always reflect how they feel about that contestant. As a coach and a judge in this unique scenario, it must seem like they are having an experience that no one can understand, until they look around them and realize there are three other people in the exact same boat. That is powerfully reassuring in its own right. Being a part of something bigger than yourself – sharing with others an important time and place within your lifetime can be a powerful aphrodisiac. It pulls for intense feelings that lead to the experience of deep connection between people who otherwise don’t appear to have that much in common.

Both Gwenn and Blake’s ex-spouses are musicians as well. However, these pairings were far less surprising because their musical genres seemed more aligned. It is likely that both had relationships with their exes earlier in their careers as well, that were shaped by common interests and goals, musically and elsewhere. However, as is the case in any relationship, what binds you together can be hard to sustain when you lose the incentive to work at it while your careers lead you in different directions. When you have kids, (as Gwen and her ex Gavin do), you may still share common interests but that high level of camaraderie and mutual understanding can begin to erode. It’s jarring when your spouse is no longer living your experience…but someone new in your life is.

It may well be that “The Voice” is the aphrodisiac Blake and Gwen were missing with their ex-partners.  The shared experience of fostering and honing creative growth in an exclusive setting while being swept further away from their former partners can trump all of the other logistics.

There are countless situations that bring unlikely couples together. Any situation infused with the magic and excitement of cultivating and showcasing your creativity, Working side by side for a common purpose, whether it be meeting a deadline at work or school, being stuck an elevator together or surviving a natural disaster or terrorist act can compel you to fall in love with someone that you would not have considered a romantic possibility before, even when you weren’t looking. The longer the time you work side by side with your unlikely crush, the more challenging it can become to fend off romantic feelings when you’re committed to someone else. The experience you share already feels like a substantive, lasting connection, and keeps building until that stage in your life ends.

The question is, does the substance remain when you’re removed from the situation? One advantage that many well-known artists and performers have is the ability to find ways to continue to keep themselves sequestered from real life, in a protective relationship bubble, after the job is over. For those of us not getting to live our dreams on a TV show, and don’t have endless funds in which to do so, know that it takes tremendous effort to keep a relationship intact and protected when inevitably you have to succumb to reality sooner or later, no matter how many resources you have.

We don’t know how Blake and Gwen’s relationship will fare when their fantasy bubble is popped when the show ends, by the reality of the pressures and responsibilities that await them as a new, untested couple. To preserve any romantic relationship, it’s important to continue to find and cultivate mutual connections and interests, to communicate openly and readily about real life issues and challenges as they present, and be prepared for the likelihood that the relationship will look and feel different as time passes. When you work on being open and respectful of your new partner’s opinions and perspectives when they differ from yours, when you recognize that the relationship won’t always feel like it did when you were in your fantasy bubble, you are managing your expectations and giving yourself and the relationship the best chance of survival when the fantasy bubble pops.